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Taste test: Gluten Free Bread Mix (Freebake)

I was tempted by an adsense advert to visit the Freebake site at www.freebake.co.uk, and bought a trial pack of four bags of gluten free flour mixes (bread mix, cake mix, pizza mix and plain flour, with packets of yeast).

The trial pack came quickly and today my coeliac daughter made two 2lb loaves of bread using the bread mix. I’ve frozen one, as she won’t get through two quickly enough.

It was easy to make by hand – though we could have used a machine if we’d wanted – and the results were good. The mix rose well, and resulted in a firm dense bread that didn’t crumble, and cut well. The bread is tasty, slightly yellow-tinted and didn’t have any of that ‘gritty’ feel that some gluten free flours give. No doubt you could add seeds and other things (onion, sun-dried tomatoes etc) to ring the changes.

Overall, then, I would recommend it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be available on prescription yet, so it isn’t a cheap option. Also, there were no baking instructions in the trial pack, though providing the packets of yeast is a good idea. Full instructions are available on their web site, for both baking by hand and by machine, but it would have been more convenient to have had a set included in the pack. Impressively, the instructions for baking by machine include different instructions for different models of breadmaker, so you could follow the correct ones for your machine.

Apart from the trial pack, which contains 4 bags of mix, each pack contains six bags, and each bag is enough to make 2 loaves of bread, 2 victoria sponge cakes, or 1 pizza. Freebake also sell seeds (and not-gluten-free grains) to be added to your bread in big packs.

I hadn’t heard of Freebake before, so perhaps they need to do some better marketing. Apparently they are a division of one of the UK’s leading suppliers of specialist ingredients to the baking industry and, as a result, have a lot of expertise.